Free Republic

In Denver. Denver is not equipped to handle any convention scenario other than a coronation, and certainly not the most (potentially) contentious national convention in 40 years. It is important to point out that the state of Colorado, and the city of Denver, is currently nearly completely controlled by Democrats at every level of government. This puts these locals in a box, politically and from a law enforcement standpoint. This sets up a scenario similar to Seattle 1999 WTO debacle. I happened to be living in downtown Seattle during that awful experience, and what stands out is that the city...

A few months ago, a day before one of the occasional marches the Capital sees demanding an end to the Iraq War, I began the descent into the Metro stop near my office, looked up, and saw a number of representatives of Code Pink standing at the railing overlooking the escalator. Or rather, I heard them first. They were screaming at the parade of commuters, at the top of their lungs and in a tone somewhere between simple frustration and righteous anger, "End the war!!!" Well, I thought, that ought to take care of things. Good work, hippies! I kid...

WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. Capitol Police arrested 10 war protesters who began shouting in the Senate gallery Wednesday. The protesters were quickly hustled into a hallway and out of the view of reporters. They had chanted, "The war is immoral! Stop funding the war!"—as police officers grabbed them and physically removed them from a visitors gallery overlooking the Senate floor. The demonstrators wore gauze shrouds over their heads and black shirts that read, "We will not be silent." One member said they represented the "National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance." Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas was speaking during debate on...

SAN FRANCISCO, Actor Sean Penn and Peace Activist Cindy Sheehan will headline "Iraq: 5 Years Too Many", an event marking the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Also featured will be Reverend Gregory Stewart, Senior Minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church; Matt Gonzalez, former President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors; and Justin Raimondo, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com. The program will begin at 5pm on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 1187 Franklin Street (near Geary) in San Francisco. After the speakers finish, attendees will march to the War Memorial Auditorium on Van Ness...

BERKELEY - Two men climbed into trees at the University of California, Berkeley oak grove this morning and tossed down supplies used by tree sitters, a grove spokesman said early Tuesday. The tree sitters themselves had not been removed by 8 a.m. Doug Buckwald, who has been involved with the tree sit since it started in December 2006, said two men climbed into an oak tree and a redwood tree and tossed food, water and other supplies used by tree sitters onto the ground. It was not immediately clear if ropes and pullies were being cut as well. The tree...

Berkeley, Calif., has always been considered a Mecca for hippies. Their staunch anti-war views and liberalism have been allowed to flourish there, and when the Marines opened up a recruiting station in the heart of Berkeley, the women who belonged to CODEPINK began choking on their vanilla lattes and vegan muffins. According to its Web site, CODEPINK "is a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end the war in Iraq, stop new wars and redirect our resources into health care, education and other life-affirming activities." While I may believe in some of their viewpoints, the insanity they...

YORBA LINDA – The first Amendment was alive and well today, Presidents' Day, as demonstrators for and against the war in Iraq displayed signs along Yorba Linda Boulevard, in front of the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum. The larger group, a dozen strong, set up on a corner waiving signs criticizing the war and handing out slices of "Bring Them Home-made Pie" to passersby. A man driving a yellow Hummer honked at the group and gave it a thumbs up. They responded in kind. One of the demonstrators, Pat Alviso, waved a sign with a picture of her son. "He...

One morning last August in San Francisco, six women in pink sweaters marched up a hilly boulevard towing pink roller bags full of shoes. They unzipped the bags in front of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi's house, dumped the shoes on her lawn, and went on to arrange loafers, pumps, and pink glittery sandals like hawkers at a yard sale. Anchoring their display was a pair of combat boots, placed on Pelosi's doorstep. The boots, like the other shoes, had been pulled from a dead body in Iraq—the body of Casey Sheehan, in fact, whose mother, Cindy, is running as an Independent...

Virtually ignored by the establishment media, the famous antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan officially kicked off her campaign to unseat Speaker Nancy Pelosi with the opening of her campaign headquarters yesterday in San Francisco. The date of her headquarters opening coincided with the date John Lennon was assassinated in New York 27 years ago. Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, hoped his passing would be remembered by people everywhere imagining a world of Peace and Love. Former Board President Matt Gonzalez, former Union Local 10 Secretary-Treasurer Clarence Thomas and former mayoral candidate Ahimsa Sumchai attended the campaign kickoff event. Note the “former” status...

Like noxious bugs swarming over a crumbling tenement, followers of Ron Paul have invaded the blogosphere. Their target is anyone who dares to criticize their hero. Bloggers have dealt with them in various ways. Some have tried banning them outright. Others allow readers to engage them in back-and-forth debates that can easily take a thread to several hundred responses. I used to find the Paulites annoying, but recently I had a revelation: Far from being scorned, Paul’s rabid fans should be welcomed and encouraged. We should do everything we can to make certain they keep pushing their man, sending him...

Apparently, America's greatest patriot was on Loonwaffle/Trooferville's favorite radio show today with the King Nutbar himself, although I'm not sure if anyone grabbed audio. If you want to listen to the rebroadcast stream, go here. I don't feel like it. Have fun.

State field director predicts second, even first in Iowa It seems like when we're young, we like to break a few rules.  Staying out a little too late, sneaking a drink before that official legal age, or backing a candidate who's outside the established mold (YEEEEEAH!) Several of those dynamics were on display Saturday at Olive Court, a notoriously wild tailgate spot three blocks from Iowa City's Kinnick Stadium.  It was here, just a year ago, that John Kerry was infamously photographed with a beer bong.  And into the anarchy marched the Ron Paul revolution. Ron Paul wasn't imbibing...

The meeting of Ron Paul activists was well under way when organizer Steven Talcott Smith offered the kind of basic advice you probably wouldn't hear at a gathering of any other Republican presidential candidate's supporters. "By the way," Smith told the Internet-driven "meet-up" of about 40 people at a library west of Boynton Beach, "by the end of this year everybody in this room should plan to be a Republican." Florida's Jan. 29 Republican primary is, not surprisingly, limited to registered GOP voters. But a Republican pedigree or a familiarity with the elections process cannot be taken for granted with...

The ardent supporters of Rep. Ron Paul, the iconoclastic Texas libertarian whose campaign for the presidency is threatening to upend the battle for the Republican nomination, got word yesterday of a new source of outrage and motivation: reports of a federal raid on a company that was selling thousands of coins marked with the craggy visage of their hero. Federal agents on Thursday raided the Evansville, Ind., headquarters of the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act and Internal Revenue Code (Norfed), an organization of "sound money" advocates that for the past decade has been selling a...

ANALYSIS: Protesters took to the streets in past conflicts; today their presence may be strongest online. In May, saddened that she had failed to stop the war in Iraq that took her son's life and made her the face of opposition, Cindy Sheehan tearfully quit the anti-war movement. She had concluded that her son Casey, a 24-year-old Army specialist killed in an April 2004 battle in Baghdad, had "died for nothing." "Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next 'American Idol' than how many people will be killed in the next few months," Sheehan...

One issue voters. Confused, emotional one issue voters. And they come from all stripes of politics. Let's have a look. The Neo nazi groups/conspiracy theorists - Ron says he will end aid to Israel. They've latched on to that one. Most of them don't want the government to function, good or bad because it keeps them in check. Not quite anarchists, but close. The Leftie Anti war crowd, not really pacifists, but bohemian cowards promoting anarchy. Paul says he'll end the war and be nice to everyone no matter how they've tried to kill us. The Conservative who really would...

MINNEAPOLIS - Shrouded in black, with a bandanna masking her face, a self-proclaimed anarchist slips into her combat boots and dashes through town, tossing a Molotov cocktail here, launching a bowling ball there. The YouTube video is more parody than threat: The flaming cocktail ignites a charcoal grill, and the bowling ball knocks down pins instead of crashing through a Navy recruiting office window. But as the video fades to black, the message on-screen is clear: "We're getting ready. What are you doing?" With less than 10 months to go before the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St.Paul, activists are already...

Ron Paul breaks into the light as freedom warrior By David M. Brown TRIBUNE-REVIEW Sunday, November 11, 2007 DES MOINES -- It used to be easy to portray Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul as a quixotic champion of a hopeless cause. But Don Quixote never raised $4.2 million in a single day. The parody of someone tilting at windmills hardly fits now that Paul is raising serious amounts of campaign cash. He's using it to fortify grassroots efforts in the important early caucus state of Iowa and to buy TV ads in New Hampshire and other key battleground states. The...

Ron Paul Political Report Volume I Number 1 Page 3 In Congress today, unquestlonlng support for Israel is true bipartisan foreign policy. Conservative Senator Jesse Helms (R-Nc) was once a critic of aid to Israel. In 1983, the Israell lobby set out to forge an alliance between the evangelical right and Jews and knew Helms would be the best place to start. As a result, in 1984 Israeli PACs and associated wealthy buslnessmen helped bankroll Helms' reelection. campaign. Once Helms was back in office, he was flown to Israel. At the Wailing wall, Helms described the revelatlon that God wanted...

t-shirt reads: "Our new weapon in the war against terrorism" - a peace sign(!)Sweatshirt reads "War is not the answer". (I guess, by the looks of it, Krispy Kremes are?)